‘The riskiest thing is that no one gives a sh*t about what you’re doing’: Liquid Death creative VP compares marketing to stand-up comedy
The VP of creative at mammoth brand Liquid Death believes there are many similarities between how stand-up comedians work and marketers – and the key for both is not being afraid to fail.
Appearing on a new episode of Mumbrella’s one-on-one podcast series, Andy Pearson opened up on how the canned water company creative team works and why they tend to release a lot of work quickly to gauge whether the customers are paying attention or not.
“I liken it a lot to the way a comedian works where a comedian has to get up on stage every night, test out material, and it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m going to try out this bit. Here we go. Try it. Okay, it failed. Okay, moving on. No skin off my back, right?’
“So, moving on. ‘Oh, wow, this thing really hits. We love this. Let’s keep doing this. Let’s dive into that.’ And so, in that kind of sense, we’re testing out all this marketing live on a real platform,” he told host Neil Griffiths.
“And so that’s a really fun place to be in, and it means that our work hopefully is getting constantly better. And we’re always getting better at every day.
“I always joke with my team. I’m like, ‘We’re getting smarter every day.’ When we feel like we’re doing something, when we hit something, we’re like, ‘Hey, this is exactly what we should be doing because we’re learning at every step of the way.’
“Learning is not a value… I don’t think we always have the right answers. We have to learn by doing the things and then understand how to get closer to right answers. But we’re not looking for the right answers.”
Ricky Gervais’ Dutch Barn Vodka campaigns are a good example of that, in which the UK star actively pokes fun at the product and the alcohol industry. A number of the advertisements have gone global online, also in part because they have been getting banned from TV.
“I always get asked all the time, ‘How do you think about risk?’ My answer is always the riskiest thing is that no one gives a shit about what you’re doing,” Pearson continued.
Listen to the full podcast with Pearson here.
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Neil Griffiths is the Managing Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the company in October 2023.
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One-on-one podcast
And what’s even better than drinking out of a can (vs. plastic)… drinking out of the tap. The water industry needs to go. It solves a problem that doesn’t exist.
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